Memoirs of a Madman and November

Gustave Flaubert

Description

One of Flaubert's earliest writings, but published only after his death, Memoirs of a Madman presents us with a young man as he reflects - alternating between musings on the present and memories of the past - on the years that have brought him to "madness", recalling the innocence of his boyhood, the first stirrings of sexual awakening and his abrupt initiation into the adult world. Also included in this volume is another, similarly themed early work, the autobiographical novella November, which Nadine Gordimer called "an unsurpassed testament of adolescence".

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714546360
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Memoirs of a Madman
and
November
Gustave Flaubert


Translated by Andrew Brown

ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classic s Ltd London House 243-253 Lower Mortlake Road Richmond Surrey tw 9 2 ll United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
‘Memoirs of a Madman’ first published in French in 1901 ‘Bibliomania’ first published in French in 1837 ‘November’ first published in French in 1910 This translation of ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ and ‘Bibliomania’ first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2002 This translation of ‘November’ first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2005 This edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2013
Translation, Introduction and Notes © Andrew Brown, 2002, 2005 Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd
Cover design: Jem Butcher
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-325-5
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
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Contents
Introduction
Memoirs of a Madman
November
Note on the Texts
Notes
Extra Material
Gustave Flaubert’s Life
Gustave Flaubert’s Works
Select Bibliography


Introduction
FLAUBERT : Spent days labouring over a single sentence. – But some say his works lack vitality. – Don’t forget to mention Flaubertian irony , with a knowing look.
For most of his life as a writer, Flaubert collected materials for a sottisier , a book of remarks, culled from his reading and things overheard in everyday life, that he thought distinguished by their incorrectness, platitude or stupidity. Many of these ended up in the Dictionary of Received Ideas that he planned to append to his last, unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, as a grotesque sample of the clichés and commonplaces to which all the world’s wisdom was degraded in the mouths of the bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century France. The above is an imaginary entry on Flaubert himself: the three components of stylistic perfection, a perhaps deficient or frozen sensibility, and an irony all the more unremitting for being finally undecidable, are all part of the legend of Flaubert as it was already developing in his own time and as it has not really changed a great deal since. But the reader aware of the legend, or coming to the short pieces in this volume after encountering the Flaubert of Madame Bovary or Sentimental Education , is in for a surprise. The immaculate stylist here seems capable of producing work distinguished by diffuseness, repetition, and odd errors of fact (he thinks a pug dog has a thick white coat). The Flaubert who would be capable of calculating with millimetric precision the position of a comma here shows a remarkable disregard for the elementary rules of punctuation (breathless strings of nouns, as when the protagonist of the ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ claims to have loved “chariots horses uniforms of war the beat of the drums…”). The Flaubert whose subtle handling of tenses was one of the reasons for which he was hailed by Proust as renovating our perception of the world in the same way as Kant’s categories here slips casually and confusingly from tense to tense with no apparent rationale, and at times produces sentences that are bafflingly ungrammatical. Where his main work is rigorously in the third person, and notoriously impersonal in tone, here we have a first-person narrative (the “memoirs”) that seems at times uncomfortably close to autobiography: it launches into metaphysical speculation, expresses opinions on everything under the sun (and several things over it), and indulges in a direct and at times emotional lyricism, while any irony is confined to a recognition of the fact that it is an adolescent who is talking, and all adolescents feel this way (while also being convinced that they are alone in their mood swings between idealistic élan and nihilistic t æ dium vit æ ) – for the narrator acknowledges that even at his most intensely world-weary, he cannot avoid striking a pose common to all the other cynical and romantic young men of nineteenth-century France.
The reader who finds the result un-Flaubertian in its clumsiness and, at times, its opacity, can lay part of the blame at the feet of the translator: but only part, for the author’s contribution to the pervasive sense of stylistic infelicity cannot be denied. But he had an excuse that the translator does not: when he wrote the ‘Memoirs’ and ‘Bibliomania’, he was still in his mid-teens. These are both œ uvres de jeunesse , and have to be read as such, for while Flaubert started writing young, he was not otherwise precocious in terms of talent or achievement. In these early works, Flaubert is as yet far removed from the heroically dedicated seeker after le mot juste he was to become: ‘Memoirs of a Madman’ was not even published in his lifetime, and shows several traces of incompleteness, while ‘Bibliomania’, his first published work, although quite effective as a piece of storytelling, is a world away from the narrative and descriptive scruples of the major novels or even, for all their (perfectly contrived) air of innocence, the late Three Tales . And yet if in one sense his mature work (from Madame Bovary onwards) was to be a rejection of all that is stylistically unrefined in these early pieces, the themes they handle were to preoccupy him throughout his career. ‘Memoirs’ , in particular, is a compendium of material that he was to rework ceaselessly – verbose but swarming with inchoate life, it is the primordial soup from which the mature writer was to crawl laboriously onto dry land.
One aspect of the ‘Memoirs’ that was to persist in Flaubert’s œ uvre is its visionary quality. Its adolescent hero is prone to cosmic fantasies of an intensity that goes some way beyond those of most teenagers. (It is unsure to what extent the hero really is adolescent – the text, with its circularity, its anticipations of what life will be like, its premonitions of how the protagonist will feel when he is the old man he already half seems to be and looks back on a life lived largely in the imagination, creates the sense of a chronological haze bordering on complete incoherence, or perhaps simply reports perfectly accurately the strangely timeless stasis, the sense of an anachronistic self without narrative bearings or forward momentum, that afflicts adolescents, and some artists, in particular). If there is a madness in the text, it lies in these visions – periods from the historical past are hallucinated in impressionistic but compelling intensity, and the narrator’s imaginings spin round in metaphysical vortices and apocalyptic fantasies of a prophetic, vengeful quality. Flaubert rings the changes on the ambivalent status of madness – boon and bane, privilege and curse, the mark of the solitary, alienated, singular being removed almost entirely from human communication (not only is this adolescent seen to be a misanthropic daydreamer by his fellows, but the disjunction between the words he shares with them and the particular things and emotions he is striving to express is a leitmotiv of the work) and yet the most universal of characteristics (is the narrator’s soul his own, or someone else’s, he asks; he talks of the world itself as a howling, slobbering madman; and all language risks being in demented excess of an unknowable reality). Still, it is hard to see him as really mad. His story was contemporary with Nikolai Gogol’s similarly-titled ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1834), and the romanticism of which the young Flaubert and Gogol were both in their idiosyncratic and dissident ways exemplars paid eloquent homage to madness as not just an escape from but a critique of a world in which industrialization and mechanization seemed increasingly to privilege calculative rationality (or simply, for Flaubert, “the bourgeois”) above all else. But while Gogol’s lonely, downtrodden clerk really does go mad (he imagines that he can hear dogs conversing, he obsessively speculates on the problems that will be caused when the earth lands on the moon, and finally decides that he is in fact the King of Spain), Flaubert’s character is too lucid to do more than mimic the stereotypes of madness: however powerful the cosmic visions, they too often verge on the vacuous rather than the prophetic. But this is part of Flaubert’s point, and one of the many ways in which the text anticipates his major works: given a world derelict of passion, glamour, or at times any significant meaning whatsoever, the ‘Memoirs’ open up various escape routes which offer, if only for a moment, some transcendence. But each of them turns out to be a dead end. Madness turns out to no exit from the humdrum Weltschmerz of an unusually articulate but otherwise unremarkable teenager. Chapter 2 evokes childhood and its enticing dreams, only to reflect bitterly on the hours spent wasted mulling over them by the fireside. The hero recounts how his poetic musings gave way to what he calls “meditation”, in other words philosophy, only immediately to cast doubt on the value of endlessly dissecting hypotheses and setting out “in geometrical style the emptiest words” (the reference to geometry may allude to Spinoza’s Ethics , a work drawn up in Euclidean ded